The present invention relates to creating a license for electronic content.
With the growing demand for online content, providers—publishers, distributors, and Web retailers—of distributed electronic content often desire to restrict access to the content to authorized users only. A copyright holder may wish to restrict access to those individuals who have paid for a copy of an electronic book, for example.
Some electronic content is distributed in a freely-readable form, that is, with no protection against unauthorized use or copying. Other content is distributed in some encrypted or otherwise unreadable form. For example, encrypted documents require a decryption key or other mechanism for rendering the document readable to an authorized user. Some of these decryption mechanisms use the same encrypted document and same key for all users. Others produce a specifically-encrypted document and unique key for each user. Yet others use the same encrypted document for all users, but supply a separate decryption, or rights license file, that is unique to each user and is in some way tied to the user's computing environment.
Prior rights license designs tie a license to a single computing environment, such as a serial number associated with a hard disk in the authorized user's computer. The corresponding electronic content can be accessed only from that hard disk or if that hard disk is present.